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Gothic garbage - 13%
This is that type of shitty gothic stuff that had a bit of an allure when information was sparse, but the image and the music were only a speck in the shadow of what good black metal did with the same elements.
This is a sloppy, disorganized review because this is a sloppy, disorganized album. It consists of lots of short sections hacked together with no flow whatsoever, occasional repetition, and a stop every once in a while because that idea has run out. Consider this a warning for my fellow fans of melodic black metal who might be misled into thinking this is anything but gothic garbage that makes Cradle of Filth sound like Bolt Thrower.
The "melodic black" part here is pitifully wimpy, and the gothic rock elements are lame 90s mallgoth stuff, not atmospheric like good goth rock. Just about anyone can play tremolo chords and soak their sound in keyboards to make wussy gothic/black metal, much to the lament of black metal fans. This is a step before that, when the elements were in place - female vocals and keyboards to water down some distorted guitars and rasps - but the puzzle wasn't yet complete. It's like a puzzle because once it was put together, nobody was having any fun with it, it was done.
The remarkable aspect of this album is that despite borrowing the dregs of black metal and copying a few forms, they neglected the bucket of paste that held even the weakest black metal together - that is, distorted guitars played rapidly with fast drumming under them creates a simple aesthetic that sounds cool, the space in the mix is filled by the roar of distortion. Instead, TdV have a lot of space in their sound that isn't filled by noise, everything sounds small, and rather wimpy. Each of the elements feels small and lonely - the keyboards are resigned to the background so they are never the lead, but they also don't fill out the sound very well. The vocals - clean male, female, and rasping - seem to be trying to take the lead, with no sense of what a lead vocalist brings. The drumming is inconsistent in volume, relatively slow, and really sets the feel of this as some sort of crappy rock album, where rather than the full roar of a metal band, there are segments of clean guitars and keys, drums and distorted guitars, or female vocals over clean guitars. They don't put it all together.
The guitars are perhaps the biggest failure here. They're supposed to be the center of the sound but they sound like they're coming through a tiny combo amp. Their presence in the sound is in a pretty small range, with none of the air and atmosphere that practically comes instantly with distortion and trebly riffs. There's hardly any flow to it, half of the riffs are little fragments that aren't even hooks, and the rest is sloppy, aimless tremolo that neither flows nor sounds cool. There's neither the tremolo-chord fullness of black metal nor the aggression of single-note death metal riffs. Towards the end of the album they stumble into some more continuous tremolo riffs that almost provide a sense of flow, but despite nearly achieving competence in one aspect, it still sucks overall.
This makes Mystic Circle sound like Mayhem.
